Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. It is a highly targeted method and very effective due to which all owners should include email marketing as a basic step for restaurant marketing. This must be included in the marketing plan of the restaurant and should make it a regular way of attracting a large number of customers. This mode of marketing may sound complicated and expensive initially, but all it requires is sending emails to a subscriber base of potential and existing customers with information about your latest offers and news. It is quite simple once you master the basic idea and develop it into a full-fledged email marketing campaign.This blog gives a few best strategies and a few marketing tips which can be implemented for restaurant marketing.

Why email marketing is still most powerful

It is an inexpensive method of marketing for your restaurant, even if you include the time invested; you will still get a marketing method that is much cheaper, much more efficient and extremely well targeted in comparison with most other marketing techniques. The people you send the emails to are those who have purposefully subscribed to your list and this is the reason that they are well targeted as they have already shown interest in your restaurant. Sometimes they are past customers and in fact your most loyal patrons along with prospective customers who are looking for special offers before they dine at your restaurant. They would anyway be happy to visit your restaurant, and some special offers will encourage them more to do so.

Benefits of an email marketing for restaurants

While collecting email addresses and sending mass emails may sound easy, when you look at the logistics of adding recipients to the email manually it seems more time consuming than it has to be. If you use a specialized service, you will see that your emails can reach more of the recipients you intend to send to. This happens because an email-marketing service staggers your emails and send only to a manageable load at one time, and then move to the next batch as compared. This is much faster and simpler than trying to send to many thousands of recipients at one time. This is the reason that specialized email marketing services are becoming increasingly popular nowadays.

With the help of an email-marketing service, it is also possible to manage your subscriber list with a user-friendly interface and provides statistics on who subscribed, when they subscribed, who unsubscribed and more. This makes the task even easier and ensures that the time you spend in writing emails is well spent in formulating creative marketing language instead of spending it in managing the technical aspects of similar marketing methods. With these services, it is also possible to easily modify the email design templates which give you the freedom to position your restaurant marketing easily within the email.

EasySendy Pro is one such web based email marketing service which is used by businesses to reach their subscribers through email. One can register, launch instantly and connect with cloud SMTP relay servers of their choice to deliver large volume email campaigns. One can check reports, track email clicks, opens of each email campaign. It also has smart autoresponder and email list segmentation.

Signing up is a powerful signal of intent to buy. Send them email until they do – Dela Quist

Make optimal use of emails in restaurant marketing

In spite of all the benefits of emails in restaurant marketing, it is the most poorly used marketing tool. However, you can change that if you are in charge of the marketing of your restaurant and are an excellent communicator. These factors are sufficient to lay the foundation of an excellent email marketing for restaurants. Remember that you have to keep in mind that creative ideas are not enough, and you need to consider the following tips to be successful with your email campaign for your restaurant marketing:

Know yourself

Your voice plays an essential role in marketing yourself, and many restaurant brands lose sight of this. Make sure you speak and act like a human being who is friends with these customers and address them as if they are one specific person and not a target market. However, be careful because phone talk becomes very obvious. If you feel that you are not able to convey your restaurant’s personality with your writing, you should get someone else who can do this. For this, the first place you can look at is your staff members as you can find a college-age responsible staff member who could spend a few hours in a week to write your content. It is important to make sure that the tone is consistent across all your marketing campaigns and not just in emails. Your website, social media and even offline marketing messages should complement each other. By being consistent, you can develop the personality of your brand and attract and retain the customers that you want. If you fail to present a comprehensive image and message to your customers they will go away with a poor impression of your brand, and this is one of the surest ways of losing customers.

Identify your overreaching goals

First, analyze what you want from your email marketing campaign apart from customer visits. This means that you need to convey the message accurately if you want customers to come to your restaurant on any particular days, what menu items you want them to try and what you want them to feel when they are in your location. It is possible to create demand and an expectation if you identify your goals in the beginning. For deciding these goals you need to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and ask the question – “What’s in it for me?” There should be some overall goals for email marketing, and there have to be individual goals for each email. Be very specific about what you wish to achieve on the whole and think how each email can drive traffic at specific times. Such a focused email marketing campaign will be much more efficient than simply trying to bombard the recipients with some kind of vague messages even if they are positive ones.

Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes

When you combine points 1 and 2 then it becomes clear that you need to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. What information do you want to give to your customers and why should they choose you? Is it that you are an eclectic fine dining restaurant which is full on Fridays and Saturdays, but there is no traffic for the rest of the week? You need to address this issue and then think about what extra you can give to the customer in order to entice him or her to visit you on weekdays. An average individual receives about 120 emails per day, and you need to cut through the clutter. You can do this by speaking the language of your ideal target customers and by acknowledging their situation.

Look for some hot topic in the news that you can ride on. You can also throw in a little sarcasm or acknowledge the fact that your email may be at priority number 118 among the 120 that they have received. The idea is to put yourself in the shoes of a person who is reviewing four to five unread emails, and you need to stand out among them.

Use fresh subject lines

The run-of-the-mill statements will simply not cut in. Others are too bland or cute and will probably get lost in a sea of emails to be read. If there is no personality to any of them – you could interchange the brands, and no one will know. This is often the problem with most of the emails that we usually receive. If you want to understand what this means you should try to read some of the emails that you receive on a daily basis. You will find that most of them use the same kind of language and cliched statements which don’t make a desired impact on the reader.

Focus on one primary call to action

If you overemphasize a link, it may manage to distract people and take a look at it, but it does not represent a call to action. There are usually a large number of calls to action in some big-brand emails, and it will be a good idea to try and emulate these. Another thing to avoid is the temptation to be all things to all people with every email. Don’t add all the offers in one email and save it for next week’s email. This will prevent the recipient from feeling overwhelmed and confused.

Don’t feed the urge to keep offering

Every single email need not include a call to action and in fact, if you are trying to build a brand and make people love that brand, you will be making a mistake if you keep pounding them with offers. Of course, you cannot do this in every email either but out of 52 emails in a year, you should definitely dedicate a few to brand building. There is no point in giving lucrative offers to the target customers if you cannot bring them about to trusting you as a brand and feeling that they will be getting value for their money with you.

Don’t call it a VIP club if it is not one

Keep in mind that a VIP status should be dependent on behavior instead of on submitting a name in an email list. Many companies make the mistake of naming every offer as a VIP offer, and hence lose their value as a brand as they come across as being desperate. If the email provider’s default footer makes references to a VIP rewards program, then change that text. Anybody can see through this and understand that it is not a VIP program at all. A customer will be happy to be called a VIP if he or she has earned it through their purchase history. If, on the other hand, you use these types of phrases randomly then a customer will be encouraged to ignore other aspects of the restaurant marketing as insincere.

Send emails every month or every week, but not more often

Make sure that you do not bombard your customers will emails. Too many emails with repeated messages will only encourage the recipient to unsubscribe from your list.

Your emails should be mobile friendly

If you look at the statistics, more than 50% of emails are being opened on mobile devices, and this is why you need to make your emails mobile friendly. Either use the email provider’s mobile templates or pressurize them to create mobile templates or create your own. If you fail to do this, you will definitely lose out on a large number of people who actually need the convenience of being able to read your emails on the go. Read the complete blog post to optimize your email for different platforms.

Don’t ever include QR codes in your emails

Although QR codes do serve a purpose, there is no reason why they should be added to an email. If a customer is reading the email using a mobile device, they may not have the ability or reason to scan them. This will simply result in the recipient getting an incomplete message, and they are not likely to respond favorably to that.

Another thing that you need to keep in mind while implementing emails in restaurant marketing is that you can keep doing what you are doing, but if you want to stand out then you need to use a combination of things. Your message has to make its way through much stuff to drive engagement with your brand. As mentioned above, the first requisite is that your message should stand out among the crowd of emails in an inbox. Then again, you need to create a need and want in the customer’s mind along with implanting a positive message. This is the reason that email marketing is more than just drafting emails with flowery language.

Quick guide to enhance the importance of emails in pubs and restaurant marketing :

Here are a few tips on how to carry forward your restaurant marketing which can be used to enhance the customer engagement :

Get started – build your email list

Keep a fishbowl which clearly indicates to the people that they will receive emails. For this purpose, the fishbowl should be kept at the entrance where they can fill out forms or keep their signed business cards to indicate that they want to sign up on your list. It will be even better to keep a tablet where people can sign up online.

Place a link to the sign-up form on your receipt.

Consider a VIP list for the regular customers because you know their names and they know yours. It will make them feel that they are visiting friends rather than coming to your restaurant for a quick meal. They should be the first ones to know what is happening.

Use the name of a person and the name of your restaurant in the ‘from’ line of your email

Use an email which is being monitored by a human

If people have signed up with the fishbowl, then send them a welcome email.

Do it in style

If you are unable to get professional photos of your dishes, make it a point to ask a friend who is good at photography to take some pictures. Make sure to plate up beautify, snap a couple of shots, and keep them handy

Include a good picture of the restaurant, either full or empty, since it will help people imagine the restaurant.Now that’s a good strategy in highlighting your restaurant marketing .

If you keep all these tips and in mind and implement these in restaurant marketing, you will be able to create an innovative email marketing campaign that will be a sure hit with your target customers. This will, in turn, ensure that your restaurant becomes more successful than it already is and you will be able to be your customer’s preferred choice.

How EasySendy Pro Proves To Be Of Great Help In Restaurant Marketing :

It allows businesses to add required SPF, DKIM. DMARC records on their sending domain name which enhances security and reliability of the domain name leading to higher email delivery rates and more email placement in the inbox of the subscribers.

This application has a feature in which for an email opened (or not opened), the subscribers can be copied/moved to a new list, thus providing the capability to re-engage such specifically targeted subscribers, enhancing customer engagement opportunities.

It has a feature in which for an email link clicked (or not clicked), the subscribers can be copied/moved to a new list, thus providing the capability to re-engage such specifically targeted subscribers, enhancing customer engagement opportunities, in turn enhancing the email marketing for restaurants.

It has a feature in which for an email opened (or not opened), the subscriber list can be segregated further by updating a custom field in the list, thus providing the capability to re-engage such specifically targeted subscribers, enhancing customer engagement opportunities.

It has a feature in which for an email link clicked (or not clicked), the subscriber list can be segregated further by updating a custom field in the list, thus providing the capability to re-engage such specifically targeted subscribers, enhancing customer engagement opportunities.

Application has a feature in which based on the individual subscriber’s actions (interests), an entirely new list can be generated or an already existing list can be modified, which ultimately will lead to more specifically targeted subscriber list and better segmentation of the subscribers.

Pro helps restaurant marketing by allowing the marketers to pay only for the emails that are sent through the application. There is no set-up costs or any other hidden costs. Moreover, the restaurant marketers can choose a payment plan specifically catering to the requirements of the restaurant business.

Pro has a simple, user-friendly interface through which restaurant marketers can keep a track of the subscribers who are opening emails, not opening emails, active, inactive, have unsubscribed, etc.

Application has better reports and analytics, helping restaurant marketers keep a track of the subscriber’s interest and actions, thus enabling better segmentation and targeting of subscribers.

Pro’s technical and customer oriented support team is available to resolve any issues the restaurant marketer might face, be it technical problems, general inquiries or advisory support.

Pro has multiple email templates and above that, has the utility so that the marketers can create their email templates and enhance their restaurant marketing. This helps the restaurant marketers in the creation of a brand image and enhance the email marketing for restaurants.

Pro has mobile compatible email templates so that the restaurant marketers do not lose out on the mobile using subscriber group.

Written By

Ankit Prakash is co-founder of EasySendy Pro and Aritic. Ankit is a passionate and determined entrepreneur; building internet product and services since 2006. You can follow him on Twitter for marketing optimization related tips.

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Comments

11 Comments

Email marketing is simply an awesome technique to grow a business.The idea of using this technique is very interesting and I think it can generate good amount to traffic to restaurants owners.I am always up for techniques like this.Thanks for sharing this blog post,I think this will be very help[ful for restaurant owners who are looking forward into marketing for their business.

Good one! Thank you for letting us now that email marketing is best for the business of restaurants.
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Hey Ankit, that is a unique blog post as till date I have hardly come across a blog that has laid down an email marketing guide for restaurants. I enjoyed reading your blog, and I feel it will not only be helpful for the restaurants, but other business sectors can take up the tips too. Of course, email marketing is the best marketing channel as per my experience. Thanks for the advice.

Hello Ankit, may I know from where did you get the idea of writing a blog on this topic? This is a very unique topic indeed. Email marketing is my favorite marketing channel that is helping millions of businesses to create their own brand name. Even restaurants should take up this channel to build their brand name, and I am sure your blog will push many out there. Thanks for the blog.

I can’t thank you enough for writing this blog. I look after the marketing of a newly opened restaurant. Since the budget is pretty tight, I was looking for cost-effective ways of marketing. After reading your post, now I am sure email marketing will be really effective for the restaurant I work for. I think even other businesses will be benefited by following these tips.

Yes, it is the best market solution when it comes to the reaching the client, Email marketing ensures a greater level of success. It is a great platform to share the recipes which you want to the customers. This increases your reputation and trust amidst the users.

This article proves that email marketing can be effectively used for restaurant marketing too. It is a must to build the name for a restaurant by sending weekly or monthly offers to the customers. This is indeed a very unique thought and it is cost effective too!

This is such a unique article! It is true that if one is serious about his restaurant, he would make a detailed restaurant marketing plan before he opens his door for business. Marketing plans might seem daunting at first, but trust me they are very convenient.

Hey Ankit, great job here on Restaurant Marketing. The competition among restaurants is fierce, and we’ll need to give our all to be successful. Apart from posting images on Instagram, we can use email marketing to send email newsletter as an opportunity to celebrate our success, discuss new menu items, or share special discounts.